The Martha Graham Dance Company, Underwater

Nothing compares with the distressing images of cars floating in the streets in New Jersey and the Rockaways, of babies carried out of darkened hospitals, or the apocalyptic scenes of frightened homeowners holed up in the bone-cold remnants of their houses. But, as the days pass, other Hurricane Sandy stories, less tragic in the scheme of things but shocking nonetheless, bubble up to the surface. Entire histories have been imperilled by the storm. New York City Opera, already reduced to a shadow of its former self by poor decision-making and financial struggles, lost much of its archive to flooding at its site on Broad Street in lower Manhattan. Even worse hit was the Martha Graham Dance Company, whose storage areas, containing sets, costumes, and paper archives from as far back as the late thirties, lie in a sodden heap in a basement on Bethune Street, just across the West Side Highway from the Hudson.

This summer, the Graham company transferred all its operations to the Westbeth complex, a federally funded artists’ residence filled with painters, musicians, sculptors, and writers. (These residents have spent the past two weeks without heat or running water, some carrying buckets up ten flights of stairs.) Until very recently, the building was the home of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which shut its doors last December, two years after the death of its founder. In June, the last of the Cunningham offices moved out, and a month later the Graham company moved in, happy to finally have its school, offices, rehearsal spaces, and sets all in one building. “We used to be all over town,” the company’s artistic director, Janet Eilber, told me.

The move was an important moment for the troupe, which just a decade ago was embroiled in a prolonged and expensive legal battle with Graham’s designated heir, Ron Protas, over the right to perform Martha’s dances. In what has proved to be a fateful decision, the company’s sets and costumes—including pieces like the white throne from “Clytemnestra” (1958) and the cloth set for “El Penitente” (1940), both by Noguchi, as well as the Karinska gown from “Episodes” (1959)—were placed in a series of rooms in the basement.

The day before the storm, alarmed by the dire predictions, the general manger, Faye Rosenbaum, mobilized a crew to place as many objects as possible on pallets two feet off the ground. This proved to be an almost risibly inadequate precaution. How could they have known that, on Monday night, a wave of water would rush in from the Hudson, pouring down the stairwell and into the basement, blowing out doors and partition walls in its wake? The watermarks in the storage area show that, at its height, the water reached practically to the ceiling, perhaps nine feet from the ground. On Tuesday afternoon, when Rosenbaum and others arrived at Westbeth to survey the damage, the stairway was still half filled, “like the stairs into a swimming pool,” in the words of LaRue Allen, the company’s executive director.

And as the waters receded, the amount of damage became shockingly apparent. A recent visit revealed a scene of chaos and incipient decay: Crates flung around every which way and cracked open, spilling out their muddy contents. Dissolving cardboard boxes on buckled shelves. Trunks and unidentifiable stuff piled high, like the detritus from a shipwreck. The stench—of filth and wet paper, swollen wood and soggy wool, and, especially, of mold—was worryingly pungent.

Later the same day, a team from Moishe’s moving company began the process of removing the waterlogged contents and transporting them back to the company’s old storage space, in Yonkers. There, Eilber, Allen, and Rosenbaum will begin the process of drying the stuff out and seeing what can be saved. Several conservators, including the head of the textiles department at the Smithsonian, Mary Ballard, have been consulted. According to Ballard, some of the costumes, most of which are made of wool jersey, may simply need a good spin in the washing machine—though that solution will presumably not apply to Karinska’s beaded costume for “Episodes.” (It was designed to hold its own weight; at one point, Martha Graham, in the role of Mary Queen of Scots, stepped out of the dress and left it standing there.) More worrisome are Noguchi’s painted wooden sets and the paper archives dating back to company’s first days. Mold is a major concern. Conservators have recommended a freeze-drying process performed by a company called Rapid Refile. As Allen confesses, “They’ve made helpful recommendations, but it’s a very, very costly way to go, and we just don’t have the money.”

For now, Eilber and Allen are more focussed on the immediate future—removing the material, drying it out, and then seeing what will be needed over the next few months. In mid-December, the company will travel to Messina, Sicily; the program there includes “Diversion of Angels” (1948), a new work called the “Lamentation Variations,” and “Chronicle” (1936). American Ballet Theatre, which also performs “Diversion,” will lend its costumes. The set for “Chronicle” is unscathed, having been shipped away on tour long before the storm. Eilber is still looking for an existing copy of the lead dancer’s long white dress for “Chronicle.” Many of the sets will probably have to be reconstructed over time. Fortunately, photographs and films of Martha’s dances, filed as “reconstruction tool kits” for archival and licensing purposes, were stored out of harm’s way. But the company may also try other approaches to reconstruction: “Maybe it’s time to create a project where the costumes are taken away, the set is not there, to allow a stripped-down look at the essential movement and choreography,” Eilber says, a tad optimistically.

It’s ironic that choreography, usually the most ephemeral of art forms, is, in this case, the one thing that the Martha Graham company still has. Choreography has no material existence; it lives in the minds of those who perform it, and is passed down from person to person, sometimes with the help of a few aide-mémoire, sometimes not. For this reason, most choreography disappears over time. Choreographers die, companies disband, dancers move on to other things. (Thus the disappointment over the closing of the Cunningham company.) But Martha’s legacy is still alive as long as the company continues to perform her work. Perhaps this is why Eilber and Allen did not seem as desperate as one might have expected at the current state of its property. “We will present these dances in their original glory, eventually,” Allen assured me.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.